I want to say that if you’re expecting a text only about balance and powercreep, you’re going to be disappointed.
1. Balancing deck popularity through price and uneven distribution of card rarities in expansions
It is known that certain types of decks and even entire classes sometimes have higher demand from players. This can create extremely unfavorable game balance situations for everyone when out of control. Therefore, the equal distribution of card rarities between classes is detrimental to all.
Instead, the rarity of a card should be decided based on the estimated demand by Blizzard before release. This way, players are encouraged to play with cards and classes that generally don’t get as much attention, while the more popular cards and decks gain some filtering of players so as not to suffer too much from changes based on opponent’s feelings. Because fewer people will have these cards due to the cost.
2. Cosmetics are welcome but shouldn’t be the focus
This can be divided into two points.
The first reason is that when you play a card game, your primary focus is collecting usable in-game items like cards.
The second reason is that as much as I like Hearthstone’s cosmetics, they will never have the same appeal as live cosmetics from games like TFT or character skins in MOBAs in general. It’s simply not a strong point of the game and there is no need to have every single one even for a whale.
3. More usable content in matches
I don’t think Blizzard should reduce what is offered for free to players, nor should they just “create more cards” per expansion. One way is to start selling new craftable hero powers with each expansion and they probably can come up with more stuff.
4. Make cards for those who play them, not for those who play against them
Hearthstone’s design makes an excessive effort to please everyone and because of this it pleases no one.
A great example of a card to explain this is the launch version of Infinitize the Maxitude:
On the one hand, it uses the Festival of Legends expansion mechanic (Finale) to the maximum, forcing the user to try to predict what they will need in the upcoming turns. On the other hand, the reward is the ability to use the card infinitely during the match, which is something a considerable portion of players do not like.
The attempt to please both sides by making the card cost 2, which was completely unfair for its old effect, meant that not only was the challenge of predicting what you will need in the next turns not worth it, but it also didn’t make the players who dislike infinite resource generation hate the card any less because it still generated infinite resources, even as a bad card.
In short, the game needs to stop comparing itself to games that aren’t card games not just in design philosophies but also in products. This really kills it.